Massachusetts Bay GIS Tutorial Provided at Woods Hole Field Center

The instructor, Eric Josephson, guiding the class through a typical exercise.

On September 14-16th, the Technology Planning and Management Corporation
(TPMC) of Scituate, MA, provided a GIS tutorial course at the WHFC. The
3-day course was taught using the ESRI GIS tool ArcView 3.1 and an extension
called Spatial Analyst. The course had an enrollment of 17 students, and
an additional 8 people auditing dropped in frequently. It was a little tight in the
Gosnold Conference room (see photo at left) but this allowed for lots of
collaboration and interaction. Although most participants were from the WHFC,
we also had participation from NOAA National Marine Sanctuary Program,
Massachusetts Water Resources Association (MWRA), and the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution. Class participants were told that they had to
have a laptop with ArcView 3.1 and Spatial Analyst loaded. They were also
advised to go to http://www.geowarehouse.com and check the news section.
The Web site contains a benchmark program that will rate your system
performance with that of ArcView. Participants were advised that they
would be challenged in working with the MassBay GIS if their score was
below 20.

Jeff Donze and Eric Josephson, the instructor, developed the course at
TPMC. They were provided with a copy of the MassBay GIS CD-ROM (Butman
and Lindsay, in press) which they used to build a tutorial CD that was used
for the course. Each student received a manual and CD that included detailed
instructions on each of the 10 chapters covered.

The back row of the class discussing some of the results!

One example used was part of the introduction to Spatial Analyst. The
example was the grid theme Boston Harbor Dilution developed by
Rich Signell. Students used the theme to experiment with different
methods of relating other themes to the Dilution grid and making queries
for grid analysis. Another example was the development of a portable
project file that could be exported to CD-ROM for distribution. Eric
gave us a Web site for a commercial
product (Project Packer) that was easier to use for this procedure.

Eric had extra handouts on topics such as the ESRI Modelbuilder, a tutorial
on how to build your own model with Spatial Analyst. He also provided a
pointer to a useful USGS ArcView extension called
Spatial Tools developed
at the Alaska Biological Science Center by Philip Hooge.

The course finished just before Hurricane Floyd breezed through the
New England area. We plan to develop a toolkit for Spatial Analyst for
use with coastal mapping applications and would like to collaborate with
anyone who is interested in similar efforts and/or training developments.
For further information on the course and further training developments,
check with Chris Polloni.